What's the difference between using (values …) versus (list …) (or literally '(one two three …)) to return multiple values from a lambda (or other implicit progn)? Does it create some special glue to ...

Quick background: I am designing a Pythonic language that I want to be as powerful as Lisp while remaining easy to use. And by "powerful", I mean "flexible and expressive".
I've just been introduced ...

I'm currently writing a LISP parser that iterates through some AutoLISP code and does its best to make it a little easier to read (changing prefix notation to infix notation, changing setq assignments ...

I am engaged in a project that works mainly in AutoCAD to design and manufacture prefabricated building components such as roofing trusses. One of our goals is to redesign a program that was written ...

I've been thinking about trying to get through the SICP again, this time well-armed with a better idea of what the SICP is meant to accomplish, and being older and wiser than my first attempt back in ...

I am trying to write a branch and bound search on the set of all functions f: D -> R, where the domain size is small (|D| ~ 20) and the range is much bigger (|R| ~ 2^20). Initially, I came up with the ...

I am starting to learn Lisp, using the SICP book. The authors mention that a procedure (i.e. function) can be recursive or iterative. Additionally, the process those procedures will generate will also ...

I am fascinated to Lisp as it is simple yet powerful. I am just a beginner and I know there have been lots of discussions on removing parentheses from Lisp and its dialects. Yet I request Lisp ninja's ...

I'm writing a simple chess engine in LISP. I actually know how the engine decide the move, it evaluates and reads some opening books. But that's not what i mean. This is my design.
57 58 59 60 61 62 ...

I'm willing to compile certain language to C or C++ for some speedups. My idea was, though, to generate readable code and use structures such std::vector and similar wherever I can, expecting CLANG to ...

When looking Python decorators someone made the statement, that they are as powerful as Lisp macros (particularly Clojure).
Looking at the examples given in PEP 318 it looks to me as if they are just ...

I had a look at XSLT for transforming one XML file into another one (HTML, etc.). Now while I see that there are benefits to XSLT (being a standardized and used tool) I am reluctant for a couple of ...

I know Lisp and Haskell are functional and logic programming languages respectively, but what exactly does this mean? How do they differ from other languages? I've heard that learning these will make ...

Does Lisp still have any special feature which has NOT been adopted by other programming languages?
By Lisp, I mean all the Lisp programming languages as a whole. I've been told how amazing Lisp is ...

I've read recently that macro support in Scala is now official. I checked the documentation page and they are reminiscent to the LISP ones. In one of his essays Paul Graham writes that when "you add ...

C++ is a great language in many ways, but some things in particular are cumbersome to write without an IDE. As a VIM user, it would be very interesting if I had access to a higher level language which ...

Experimenting with various lisps lately (clojure especially) i have wondered if there are any s expression based representations of (subsets) of c, so you could use lisp/closure to write macros and ...

I've been learning both Common Lisp and Racket, and one thing that I consistently hear is that Racket is a much "smaller" language than Common Lisp. I was wondering what this really meant. As far as I ...

Similar question here (but not the same) because I am interested in which specific algorithms work particularly well in Lisp.
Lisp tutorials always give the example of finding factorials, but wanting ...

As mush as FP has done, in the end, all our programs are structured.
That is, it doesn't matter how pure or functional we make a them - they are always translated to assembly,
so what actually runs ...

On that competition, you gain access to a system with gcc, vim, emacs and Java. You can't take any file with you and there's no internet access, but you can do whatever you want inside that system. ...

I am trying to learn Lisp and looking at all the Lisps out there and their differences.
I see that in some implementations of Scheme, you can use square brackets interchangeably with round brackets ...

I'm looking for an online course that I can use to learn programming using Lisp (especially Scheme), from scratch. I didn't find anything similar on Coursera/Udacity - the only resource I found was on ...

Given a number n, find a permutation of the numbers 1...n such that all adjacent entries sum up to primes. If such a permutation does not exist, throw an error.
Is there a purely-functional way to do ...

I spent couple of months learning Scala and got overwhelmed by number of different constructs it had,
After looking at partial functions, partially-applied functions, pattern matching, actor syntax,
I ...

I have been reading about the libraries people have written for languages like Java and C# that make use of byte code weaving to do things like intercept function calls, insert logging code, etc. I ...

I'm learning Common Lisp, mostly as a "mind gym" hobby thing, but I want to end up with a set of skills that would also be usable "in real life", because when you learn a language you also accumulate ...

There seems to be an immediate problem with starting to develop in Common Lisp: choosing an implementation. What should one take into account, and how much weight should it bear when considering a CL ...

This question is centered around Scheme but really could be applied to any LISP or programming language in general.
Background
So I recently picked up Scheme again having toyed with it once or twice ...

For a few decades the programming language of choice for AI was either Prolog or LISP, and a few more others that are not so well known. Most of them were designed before the 70's.
Changes happens a ...

I have only a limited knowledge of Lisp (trying to learn a bit in my free time) but as far as I understand Lisp macros allow to introduce new language constructs and syntax by describing them in Lisp ...

From Steve Yegge's "Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp":
Lisp has a little syntax, and it shows up occasionally as, for instance, '(foo)
being expanded as (quote foo), usually when you least expect it.
...